CHAPTER XVII THE PURSUIT

A cold bitter wind hurled its defiance along the slope, its shrieking voice trumpeting through the pines. In the sky—a vast canopy flung over a frozen world—the sun shone wanly. On either side of the sun hung sun-dogs. In the air—frost. Below, a limitless, monotonous expanse of snow.

In the sledge, which flew along over the hard snow-surface, Dick and Toma sat muffled to their ears. From time to time, they beat their arms about their shivering bodies and urged on the dogs. Already they had come eight or ten miles along the faint trail they had made on the previous day.

In their pursuit of the Indian they had expected, quite naturally, to go southwestward in the direction of the Indian encampment. With their lighter load and swifter team; they would rapidly gain on him. Before night, surely, they would overtake him. It was all simply a matter of time and patience and perseverance. In the end, they would be successful.
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Much to their surprise, the thief chose a different route entirely. Apparently he had no intention of returning to his home and friends with his ill-gained booty. A few miles farther on, he had set his course to the west, following a hill-chain that ran parallel to the Wapiti River.

The boys turned sharply and continued the pursuit. The sledge tracks of the thief could be discerned quite plainly.

“I can’t imagine where he’s going,” mused Dick. “It isn’t to his own home. Where do you suppose, Toma?”

“Mebbe up in the hills somewhere to another encampment. Mebbe him ’fraid to go back to his own people.”

“Or,” guessed the other, “perhaps his purpose is to make a secret cache up there in the hills. He thinks, no doubt, that the mail sacks and medicine chests are filled with valuable provisions. I’d like to see his face when he opens one of them.”

Toma broke into a low chuckle.

“It make me laugh if he try drink medicine an’ get very sick. Mebbe him fool enough to think medicine some new kind of whiskey.”

“God help him, if he does. I don’t know what sort of medicine Dr. Brady may have there. There’s vaccine for smallpox and drugs of all kinds. I’m sure that some of them are deadly poison. He’s apt to be more than sick if he tries it.”
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Presently the trail wound into the hills. It went up and up and up, and then down and then up again. It skirted deep ravines and dangerous precipices. It crossed the wide basin of a lake. It continued on—the rutted tracks of that thief’s sledge—with the unbroken insistence of the passing of time itself.

“He’s certainly travelling and no mistake. He must be going almost as fast as we are,” complained Dick. “He’ll kill that team of mine.”

“Don’t you worry, we catch him. Pretty soon we catch him.”

“We will, of course, if we don’t lose his trail. The fool will be compelled to stop soon for something to eat.”

“Sometimes Indians go days without stop for something to eat,” commented Toma.

“Not if he thinks he has a store of precious things aboard,” grinned his companion. “His fingers will be itching to get at those sacks. He’ll want to explore the mystery of those medicine chests.”

Again Toma chuckled.

“This mail all same like ’em paper?” he inquired.
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“It is paper,” replied Dick. “Envelopes, hundreds of envelopes, bulging with paper. Then, in the second-class mail pouches, there’ll be circulars and catalogs and newspapers, hundreds of pounds altogether to tempt his mounting appetite. I think he’ll relish the stamps too. They’ll be green and red, with a picture of King George on one side and mucilage on the other. The mucilage has a sweet, toothsome taste he’ll like.”

Toma doubled up in a paroxysm of laughter.

“I think that very good joke on that Indian. Mebbe him find out it bad thing to steal.”

“I don’t know about that. He looks as if he were beyond redemption.”

Toma cracked his whip, and the huskies sprang forward, scrambling up an incline. It was steep here, so Dick got out and trotted behind. The exercise warmed his feet and sent the blood racing through his body.

When he tumbled back on the sledge again, Toma half-turned and with the butt of his whip pointed excitedly at the dogs.

“Look!” he cried.

The sudden change in the behavior of the huskies was very noticeable. Their ears were pricked higher. The leader, a beautiful long-haired malemute, so much resembling a wolf that it was almost impossible to tell the difference, had commenced to whine softly, straining at her harness in fitful, nervous leaps.

“Somebody close ahead,” Toma whispered. “We see ’em pretty quick now.”
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Dick leaned forward and picked up his rifle, and commenced fumbling with the breech. His expression had grown suddenly tense. He rose to a position on his knees, swaying there from the motion of the sleigh, his gaze set unwaveringly, expectantly, on the trail ahead.

At a furious rate of speed, they descended another slope, then, more slowly, began circling up around the next hill, emerging to a sparsely wooded area, which, in turn, at the farther side, dropped abruptly to a deep tree-covered valley.

Abruptly, the boys turned toward each other. Toma muttered something under his breath; Dick relaxed to a sitting position, whistling his astonishment.

“I didn’t expect anything like this,” remarked Dick, recovering somewhat from his surprise. “An Indian village! Look, Toma, there are scores of tepees down there. No wonder he came this way.”

Again they started—but not at the sight of those tepees, strung along the floor of the valley, nor yet at the sight of the Indians themselves, here and there plainly distinguishable—but at the appearance of a loaded sledge behind a team of gray malemutes, proceeding quickly toward the village.

“He isn’t very far ahead of us,” exulted Dick. “He’ll soon be cornered. He can’t get away. We’ve won, Toma.”

Toma’s eyes were shining.

“Him big fool to come here. What you think?”
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“He may have friends. Perhaps they’ll want to shield him.”

The young Indian’s answer was to crack his whip and to shout to the huskies. The sledge leaped forward. It threw up a quantity of loose snow, through which it plowed. It rocked perilously as it negotiated the top of the valley slope, then, in spite of Dick’s foot pressed hard on the brake-board, shot down, almost running over the dogs.

Taking a steeper but more direct route to the village than had been attempted by the thief, they were only a few yards behind him when they made their final whirlwind spurt through the orderly row of tepees and the gaping crowds, and came to a jarring but dramatic halt.

The thief was unaware of his danger, had not even a premonition of the near presence of his pursuers, until, with a certain amusing dignity, he slipped from the top of his precious load and waved an exaggerated greeting to the crowd.

His triumph was short-lived. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw two figures who looked strangely familiar. In order to make sure, he turned his head and in that moment his self-confidence poured from him like water out of a bucket.
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A tiny squeak, of the sort a mouse makes under the heel of an enraged householder, and his mittened hands went straight up. He came forward, bellowing for mercy. Tears of terror welled into his eyes. Never before had Dick seen any person more craven, cowardly-weak and utterly disgusting than he. Somehow, it blunted the edge of his own and Toma’s victory to take a man like that. It was too easy.

Startled at first, the onlookers broke into a roar of laughter. They were quick to grasp the situation. In a trice, the two boys and their prisoner were the pivot around which circled and revolved a jeering, highly-amused crowd.

“They ask ’em me to make ’em talk about how it all happen,” Toma shouted in Dick’s ear.

“Tell them that we’ll explain later,” Dick instructed. “Say that we want something to eat. Tell them——”

He broke off as the milling throng unexpectedly drew back, making a path for a white-haired old man, who carried himself with great dignity.

“Chief,” said Toma.

“You talk to him.”

“What I say?”

“Tell the truth, Toma. Nothing else. Explain to him that this man is a thief, that we followed him here to recover valuable mail and medicine for the sick. I’m sure he’ll believe you. Be honest and straightforward, Toma.”
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Dick found it utterly impossible to keep his place at his chum’s side. A forward surge of the inquisitive swept him and his prisoner this way and that, while shoulders bumped shoulders and curious eyes peered into his. He was glad when the interview came to an end and the chief motioned for the crowd to disperse. Toma sought him out, smiling with satisfaction.

“Ever’thing all right, Dick. Chief him know this man for very bad fellow. He say him very glad if you leave him to be punish.”

“Does he belong to this tribe?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve a good notion to do it. It will save us a lot of trouble and worry. By the way, did you remember to tell him about the police boots and revolver?”

“Yes, I tell him that too.”

“What did he say?”

“After while I tell you.”

“Why not now, Toma?”

“You understand bye-’n’-bye. You come with me pretty soon to chief’s tepee.”

“All right. Well, they can have this cowardly sneak if they want him. I’m sure I don’t.”
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A little later, escorted by one of the headmen of the village, Dick and Toma arrived at the tepee of the chief. On hands and knees, they crawled through the aperture, over which hung a wide strip of tanned moose-hide, soft as chamois. Bear-skins covered the earth floor within, except in the center space, where a wood fire burned cheerfully. It was warm inside the tepee and clean and tidy. A faint odor of wood smoke mingled with the more pungent and appetizing smell of broiling meat.

Dick’s first impression was that it was pleasant to be there in so warm and comfortable a place; his next, a condition accentuated, no doubt, by the boiling kettle, was a feeling of hunger and weariness. Presently curiosity induced him to examine the interior more closely. Looking about, he perceived several persons of both sexes. One was the white-haired chief, who had interviewed Toma. Behind the chief, at a respectful distance, an aged squaw—probably the chief’s wife, and beyond her an individual of such unusual appearance that Dick’s eyes, resting upon him, remained there as if transfixed.

The man was emaciated, worn almost to a skeleton. From the depths of sunken sockets, burned two feverish eyes. A heavy beard-growth covered, but did not conceal, the deep hollows under the protruding cheek bones.

Dick continued to look at the man for several minutes, conscious of a steadily increasing horror. The person’s forehead was ghastly white, curving up to a matted crop of straw-colored hair. Around the drooping shoulders a blanket was held in place with considerable difficulty by a thin, wasted hand.
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Dick was about to turn his gaze toward something less pathetic and terrible, when the effort of holding the blanket in place, proved too much for the unfortunate creature, and it slipped down over one thin shoulder, revealing—to Dick’s unutterable amazement—a crimson, tattered garment, the tunic of the royal mounted police.

Reaching out, Dick seized Toma’s arm, holding it in a vice-like grip.

“May God help him! Is that Rand?”

“Yes,” said Toma, his voice seeming to come from a great distance, “it Corporal Rand. All time, before I come here, I knew that. The chief him tell me all about it. Indian hunter find ’em Corporal Rand two days ago, where he lay down in the snow. Half dead, feet froze, no eat, no rifle—nothing. He get much better after while. Bye-’n’-bye mebbe all right. Get his sense back. Jus’ like crazy man now.”

Dick gulped down a lump in his throat, and hurried to the side of the mounted policeman. Gently, he placed one hand on the corporal’s head.

“Corporal Rand.”

No answer.

“Corporal Rand.”

Still no answer.

“You know me, corporal. This is Dick Kent. Toma is here, too. Look up at me, corporal. Look up! We’re here to help you. Look up!”
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Corporal Rand looked up.

“This is Dick Kent,” beseeched that young man. “Don’t you understand—Dick Kent.”

“Of course,” muttered the mounted policeman, and his eyes burned into Dick’s, “I’ll remember that—certainly. Tomorrow, gentlemen, we’ll divide the flour. Two to Bill, two to Thomas, two to me. That’s all there is. You’re welcome, I’m sure. It was my fault entirely.”

Rand paused, mumbling to himself, wholly unaware that a tear had fallen from somewhere above to the thatch of straw-colored hair. His chin dropped forward until it rested on his chest. His eyes closed wearily. For a moment he seemed to doze. But only for a moment—then——

“Provoking, isn’t it?” he made a pathetic attempt at a smile. “I’d begun to fear I’d lost them.”

“Lost what?” gulped Dick.

“Boots,” came the prompt rejoinder, “a pair of boots.”

“Yes! Yes! But what else?”

The answer was disappointing:

“Three fishhooks and a ball of string. I’m very sorry, gentlemen.”